Maud
As Maud sat on the edge of the bed, at that late night time where it was hard to do anything but think of sleeping, and every movement toward bed seemed to take forever, her thoughts drifted into memory. The jasmine air from the courtyard became the air of the forests of southern Chyr...
“My love! My love! Come down to me.”
“My love my eye,” Maud took her slipper off and threw it down at him.
From below, Ethan laughed and said, “Well, now you have to come down.”
Maybe he thought that Maud would come out through the back door if not the front door. But instead she came out of the turret window, landed on the little flat roof, and then climbed from there to him in the soft wet grass, holding her hand out for her slipper.
“What are you doing here?”
“Aren’t you glad to see me?”
“I’ll tell you that when you tell me what you’re doing here.”
Instead he caught her hand, and they walked through the darkness toward the starlit band of the stream in the woods.
“The grass was dewy underfoot and
all the tender stars did shine
When Ivo of the Linthindor courted
the blessed Celandine
Blessed of name, blessed of eye,
the fairy queen he saw
And all the blood of stars in him
was filled with tender awe.”
“You’re just like a bard, you know that?” Maud said.
He kissed her on the cheek.
“You really think I’m like Celandine.”
“You are finer by far,” Ethan told her, “than Celandine.”
He leapt up on a rock and held his hand out to her. He helped her climb onto the mossy place, and then walked up a little to stand by the river. The stars were so bright they painted the water, and all the trees guarded them.
“Would you fall out of the sky for me?” Maud said.
“Hum?”
“You know one line of the story—”
“I know several lines of the story—”
“But you don’t know—”
“Conrad was one of the Kuaelar,” he pointed up at the sky. “The Stars. He lived in Kokobeam, that is the realm of the stars, and one night he leaned out of heaven, entranced by the beauty of Teahana, and he fell to earth. I know the story.”
“A lot of stars used to fall out of the sky entranced by beauty.”
Ethan grinned and kissed her.
“It was a different time.”
They were kissing now, and Maud was pulling his face close to hers when she started and pointed.
“What?”
“A falling star.”
They both watched, and when it had arced through the night, Ethan said, “Well, I guess the time we live in is not so different after all.”
“Are you going to kiss me again?”
“I could,” Ethan said, kissing her. “If you’d like.”
“I like the way your lips almost stick to mine. It’s like being branded.”
Ethan held her shoulders and she liked that too. She liked how his eyes were black, twinkling pools, and he came and kissed her again and he smelled like spice, like pepper and like the wild mint they’d climbed through. He kissed her on her throat, and then opened her robe a little and kissed her between her breasts.
“Do you want me to stop?”
His voice was low. He was looking at her. H waited for her word, and Maud felt a flooding, an opening.
“No,” she said, unsteadily. “That… would not be a good idea at all.”
They held onto each other, kissing greedily.
“That space, back there. In the moss,” Ethan said, his voice panting a little.
“Would you like that?”
She didn’t want to be coy or witty anymore. This surprised her. This desire was numbing at the same time the plac between her thighs was wet and hot. She nodded. Ethan took her by the hand, tenderly, and they went into the little dark mossy place, to lie on the shelf they had climbed to reach the river.
They didn’t say anything. This wasn’t the time for saying things. This was the time for kissing and darkness and more darkness. Something about the night took away any inhibition, and Maud lifted her arms and let her nightgown be taken from her. She could never have been naked if there hadn’t been night for cover. She could never have accepted these hot kisses on her breasts, on her nipples, down her belly, down to the center.
Ethan lay on his side letting him undress her. She was surprised by the belt buckles and trouser snaps, the shirt buttons. She had heard that women wore so much more. But then she lived in the woods, and was away from the court most of the time. She had come out here in her nightclothes. The warmth and the solidity of his body under the cotton and the silk and the leather that had always encased him surprised her.
“Maud,” his voice came out a little startled moan, and then they joined, legs around legs, needing their bodies to press together, needing to hold more and more of each other, to kiss more and more.
“Are you afraid?” he said, “to let me in?”
She was, but she said no.
“I’m afraid,” he confessed.
Slowly and tenderly they worked. She was the earth for him, like that story where the Sun came down to love her and they made the world. She felt so powerful. She felt so open to him. The warm weight of him settled between her, across her, his sighing breath, and then gently they worked at it again before they both caught their breaths at his entrance, the unexpected pain, the flood of pain that turned to heat, the strangeness of him inside of her. It was a little uncomfortable at first, but wonderful, that she could hold Ethan there. He was still and quiet. They were both in this wonder. She repeated it over to herself. That he could be inside of her. And then he began to move, to slowly build a rhythm, and her thighs pulled him in even more. Even more they joined. Even more. The moss was soft and damp on her back. Ethan’s leather trews were her pillow. His pants were pillow because he didn’t have them on, she thought, because he was naked with her and her hands went up and down his body and pulled him further and further in. She was convinced that it must be possible to swallow him whole, to pull him so far inside he would become her heart.
Conn
It had been a while now since Conn had listened to the complaints about their winding journey through Chyr. Now it was pretty much understood that only by that jouney, across the Marnen Plains and the cities of the north, had they come to what they had now, which was something new and vital, which was stronger than anything they had known before. Yrrmarayn was on the the southern end of the Affren River, at the Great Harbor, and on the other side of it could be seen Westrial, but it might as well have been another world as much as another kingdom. One night, when they had still been back in the strange and crumbling city of Niakkaran, Matt had asked the question that, though it seemed silly now, Conn had to admit had been on his mind too.
“All the Royan kingdoms land on the West edge of Osse. Haven’t you ever feared you would be taken by the Sendics, or that when war comes you will be part of it?”
“That was never a danger,” the merchant they had been talking to explained, even as the men in turbans around them had laughed, not in cruelty, but in indulgence.
The merchant took out paper and traced the familiar land they knew, the Ayl Kingdosm to the South, Great Hale to the north. He filled in some land from Dayne across the sea, and then a little block for the Gallish kingdoms south east of the sea that separated them from land of Ossar.
“That is your world, and to the east there is the Great Sea from which the Sinercians came to build their empire. That’s the world to you, right?”
“Well, that is the world,” Matt said.
“It’s one view of it,” the Bailkuk the merchant said.
And then he had filled in the southern shore of the Great Sea.
“There is Chem, and there is Carthage
He tilted the paper so the Far West with Chyr and Rheged and Elmet were now at the bottom near his fingertips, and he drew beside Daumany, Solahn, and then past Chyr, the Isle of Solea, and then dropping from the Far North, Ikibukuro and Haean. Going to the south he drew Assendath and Ur Shangal, and then Enroghed, and Beside Enroghed in large letter, Yuban.
“I have shown you your world which goes East to West. Now see our world which goes North to South. Aside from Chyr and Rheged and Elmet being old and strong, they are allied to to these lands, part of this world, allied to Armor and the Gallish kingdoms as well. If you study the map, if you get used to living here, you will understand it is the lands of your white men that are unsteady and fragile, not ours.”
When they had left that wondrous town they left with Lydick, the long tall boy, and he brought his sister along. It almost reminded Conn of old times when they had all shared the apartments in the old Blue Temple. He ached for his sister Nialla, and sometimes his balls ached and his cock stretched remember shoving himself inside of hr husband Jon, and spilling his seed.
The days they traveled to southern Chyr, the only person he spilled his seed in was Derek. The two of them had rarely gotten to live as a couple, exclusive lovers one to another. It wasn’t about the sex either. Often, as they traveled south through the plain country, they were too tired for that. When they entered the southern lands there were more cities, and the fashion had changed. The fashion, in fact, was like the high fashion of Westrial, except that Westrial wasn’t high enough. The impressive castles and palaces were not like what they’d left behind in the drier north. These were old, but they were not antique and crumbling. The great roads were full of pageantry as mighty lords bearing the banners of their ancient houses marched up and down them, and troubadours with lutes that reminded Derek of the tales of the Gallish countries sang of mighty heroes. They had stopped at many Blue Houses and Houses of Wisdom, and everytime they left with someone, not always a boy, sometimes a maid or a tired cook, sometimes an old Blue priest who thought he was done, and then there had been a few men who came night after night for learning, for coffee, for sex, but who were looking for a pilgrimage. When Cal and Conn and Derek led the troupe down the Great Highway, they did not head for the capital city of Immrachyr where Queen Ermengild lived.
At the back of their growing entourage, Quinton, sitting in a new vardo said, “We head for Turusachan, the Great Temple City.”
Their own beloved Blue temple was the oldest in the Sendic kingdoms, and perhaps one of the oldest in the whole of Ossar, including Chyr. Everyone knew it had been established almost after the end of the Second Creation. A rectangle, of deep blue stone with a façade of scored pillars running up it and no windows and a red door which, though large, seemed small in scale to the rest of the front, their Blue Temple had been a beautiful strange place unlike anything else in Kingsboro, a true hold over from the time when there was no Westrial, even when there had been no Locrys or when Locrys was only part of Old Chyr.
But in Westrial, the Blue Priesthood, though still honored, was far from the most important priesthood. The New Faith and the White Priests, with their Cathedral and then Purplelkirk, and their small abbeys in the city were the true religious power. But in Chyr the New Faith had never happened, and in Chyr, the Blue Priesthood had arisen to take that place.
In the Sendic lands the New Faith had split from the original Church on the Mainland. This meant that the archbishops in Kingsboro and Ambridge had only a shadow of the power that the High Primate in Cyra held. In Cyra, where the Old Ptimate who held sway over the Gallish lands and Armor, Avrance and Este ruled, that whole city was given to the New Faith and likewise, here in Turusachan, the blue stone of the Temple opened up to create an entire city. When they came through the Red Gate, Derek pointed out the spire tower like an upturned sugar loaf that might have been the high sanctuary.
“I am at a loss for words,” Gabriel said. “I have been a part of the Blue Temple my whole life, and I never knew. I never had any idea that all of this existed.”
